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Robert Flaherty's "Nanook of the North"
The Author -
Bibliography -
About The Video
Many authors have previously chronicled the circumstances surrounding the transformation of Robert Flaherty from professional explorer into professional filmmaker, from making maps of Hudson Bay and searching for ore deposits for the Canadian railways and mining companies-to making a silent film for Revillion Frères that became Nanook of the North. Released in 1922, Nanook is cited by most film historians as the first feature-length documentary. Flaherty himself recounted numerous details about its making in his 1924 book, My Eskimo Friends. By the time it was published the film had become an international success and Allariallak, the Inuit of indeterminate age who portrayed "Nanook the Bear," had died of starvation on a deer hunt. Flaherty's ethnographic impulse was born of his repeated encounters and interaction with native people during his work as a surveyor and prospector. As early as 1913, this nascent desire to record another culture led him to bring along a motion picture camera. All 70,000 feet of that early shooting went up in smoke when ash from Flaherty's cigarette ignited the cellulose nitrate base on his negative. Believing that much of what he had lost was "too crude to be interesting," Flaherty published a book, The Drawings of Ennoesweetok of the Sikosilingmiut Tribe of the Eskimo, and used a surviving print of his first movie to get financial backers for what would become Nanook of the North. Flaherty's blue-green sensitive Orthochromatic stock helped him to render the rugged geography of the sub-arctic in painterly tones. His particular appreciation of the stark beauty of the Northwest Territories and the stoic resilience of its natives had developed up over a lifetime. Beginning with map-making excursions with his father while he was still a child, Flaherty's relationship to the terrain was pre-defined by his own work as a cartographer and mineralogist. As one title card suggests, the North is a place of "Long nights--the wail of the wind--snow smoking fields of sea and plain--the brass ball of sun a mockery in the sky..." With camera movement restricted to brief panning or tilting, Flaherty used the movement of nature--a boat skimming the floe-filled waves of the summer waters, the feathery fingers of mist snaking over the winter ice--to introduce the seasons and to create a sense of pantheistic animation amid the desolate splendor. But Flaherty's film is first and last a document Shot after shot reasserts the harshness of an environment where nothing grows. But its inhabitants, whom Flaherty introduces as the "fearless, lovable, happy-go-lucky Eskimo," are remarkably insouciant in the face of an unending life-and-death struggle. Despite the wording of his titles and even in the trading post scenes, where Nanook barters for beads and marvels at a gramophone, Flaherty's visual record is remarkably free of "civilized" condescension. From the shot of Nanook biting the edge of a gramophone disc, the viewer is quickly transported to the fishing grounds where Nanook bites his catch and "kills the big ones with his teeth." All the sequences which follow, from the rush of kayaks across choppy waters to the Walrus hunt to Nanook's single-handed construction of an igloo with only an ivory knife blade for a tool, reaffirm the dauntless vitality of the Inuit. A particularly stark yet elegiac sequence is the final hunt for the Orjuk or great seal. After finding a blow hole in the ice, Nanook waits patiently for the moment to fling his harpoon. Using eight shots, Flaherty captures his formidable struggle with the unseen prey. No one can say how long Nanook actually wrestled with the Orjuk. Flaherty's sequence lasts just over two minutes; but the intensity of the event, as Nanook repeatedly hauls in line only to be jerked down and dragged over the ice back to the blow hole, is fully rendered. A striking final camera angle, in two parts, captures the moment when Nanook knows he has won. He waves to his wives and children, and, while he holds on in the foreground, they come across the ice behind him in real time and help pull out the catch. In her book, The Odyssey of a Film-maker, Flaherty's collaborator and widow France Hubbard Flaherty reasserts the frequently applied epithet of "Father of the Documentary." She also claims that "his films themselves do not give evidence of a method, that is the apparatus of film-making and its devices." Certainly in Nanook Flaherty had few apparati at his disposal: two hand-cranked Akeley cameras and a minimum of supporting equipment. Perhaps the most remarkable technical accomplishment of filming in arctic conditions in 1919 and 1920 was not that Flaherty's cameras withstood the cold, but that he and his Eskimo aides successfully disassembled them at the end of every shooting day to wipe the condensed moisture from their inner workings and put them back together to face the cold again. Even more extraordinary was that Flaherty turned his Hudson Bay cabin into a film lab, where he not only heated vats of chemicals with enough precision to process his negative but also pri Flaherty has sometimes been criticized by subsequent generations of documentarians for his "reconstruction" of scenes, most notably inside the igloo. Since the real thing was much too small and dark for filming, Flaherty's actors built an oversized model. This igloo mansion collapsed in early attempts and, even when finally built with numerous ice windows, was still too dark. Flaherty ultimately removed portions of the ceiling to let in enough sunlight. Remarkably no contemporary viewers seemed to notice in the film's final sequence that Nanook and his family were taller than the deserted igloo into which they crawled for shelter, but that once inside they stood unencumbered beneath a vaulted dome. In fact, while it may be a far cry from cinema verité, the attempt to make a large-scale ice house was consistent with the ethnographic principal of recording the people of any culture in the environment as it is. How much simpler would it have been to shoot the Inuit family's snow-bed in full For those who believe that documentary and ethnographic filmmaking has evolved into a convention in which the filmmaker tries to remove as much of his or her cultural bias as possible, Flaherty did just that in his depiction of the events inside the igloos. While the Inuit drawing of Flaherty the kabloonak or Westerner directing his two native cameraman affirms the director's control, he chose to keep his mediating influences in check. Today's "reality based" filmmakers have made televised reconstruction an operative method. Still it could be argued that Flaherty's most serious manipulation of the subject was to pay both his technical assistants and his performers. For Flaherty this was essential to control Nanook's nomadic life-style. "Do you know that you and your men may have to give up making a kill," Flaherty recounted telling Nanook, "if it interferes with my film? Will you remember that it is the picture of you hunting the iviuk [walrus] that I want, and not their meat?" Years before terms like documentary or ethnographic film were being debated, Flaherty had an instinctive understanding of the phenomenology of his art. Perhaps it was clear from the reactions of his performers when he projected the film of the iviuk hunt for them. The Inuit--not unlike the Parisians who watched scenes filmed by the Lumière brothers 100 years ago and fled the grainy image of an approaching train--were slightly
Bibliography Henri Agel. Robert J. Flaherty. Paris: Éditions Seghers, 1965. Robert Barsan. The Vision of Robert Flaherty. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1988. Arthur Calder-Marshall. The Innocent Eye, the Life of Robert J. Flaherty. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963. Frances Hubbard Flaherty. The Odyssey of a Film-maker, Robert Flaherty's Story. Urbana, Illinois: Beta Phi Mu, 1960. Robert J. Flaherty, in collaboration with Frances Hubbard Flaherty. My Eskimo Friends "Nanook of the North". Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1924. Richard Griffith. The World of Robert Flaherty. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1953. Paul Rotha. Robert J. Flaherty, A Biography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. Nanook credits on The Internet Movie Database A Note on the Video The currently available video of Nanook of the North was reconstructed by film historian David Shepard with an evocative score by Stanley Silverman. Although remarkable by 1976 standards, current digital technology could make even more dramatic improvements in the image quality and bring the viewer closer to experiencing the pictorial quality of Flaherty's original. Other videos of interest are Nanook Revisited a critical revision of the film revealing many of Flaherty's dramatic liberties and Nanook or Kabloonak a 1994 French-Canadian dramatization of Flaherty making his motion picture. Author's Bio Alain Silver is a motion picture historian and producer. He has written and edited eight genre and director studies, most notably on film noir, as well as books on film production. He has produced four feature films, various music videos and commercials, two documentaries, and supervised production on scores of other projects. He has also produced mumerous soundtrack albums for Citadel Records and Bay Cities Music. More details are at "http://members.aol.com/alainsil" Related Links Nunavut Newspaper
Nanook of the North: The Film
Nanook: National Library of Canada
Daily weather report for where Nanook lived
Welcome to Nunavut
Arctic Circle
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